A brief paean to PBS...

I had another Saturday evening in this weekend and after the Cardinals-Tigers baseball game ended I switched it over to channel thirteen. Ever since coming to New York I have enjoyed Saturday night movies, commercial free, on PBS. I have picked up lots of films I never would have seen otherwise, at least until the arrival of Netflix. Although quite often the selection of movies doesn't interest me particularly, and they do have a habit of replaying some movies too often (but when those repeats are films like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story, it's hard to complain.)

On Saturday though it was three great films. I caught most of Sweet Smell of Success for the first time and it's truly a kick-ass film that I hope impressed those European auteurs when it first came out. The ending shot is so absolutely devastating. You see Kirk Douglas looking over a balcony onto all New York in the morning having just lost what he was trying to save through the whole movie, his sister is walking down the street having just made a sorrowful break in her life, and Tony Curtis, who served as engineer of all of Douglas' machinations is getting punched by a cop and kicked in the gut on the sidewalk. Fantastic.

Then it was The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier; another film I've wanted to see for awhile and equally strong and bleak in outlook. And then, beginning around 2 in the morning, Night of the Living Dead. A film I've seen before, luckily, because I fell asleep in the middle of it.

So in tribute to the joys of late night programming I have only this to say:

They're coming to get you Barbara!!!